Alcoa Selects PLM Solutions From IBM and Dassault Systèmes

IBM (www.ibm.com) and Dassault Systèmes today announced that Alcoa (www.alcoa.com) has chosen their Product Lifecycle Management solutions (PLM) to improve collaboration efficiency and increase integration between engineering and production. Alcoa will be presenting its collaborative facilities management solution at the COE Annual Users Conference in Phoenix this week. Alcoa is a producer and manager of aluminum products and components.

The supplier is active in the aerospace, commercial transportation and automotive industry, among others. It has experienced the benefits of SMARTEAM in two of its subsidiaries.

Alcoa's capital engineering for Cleveland Works deployed SMARTEAM for facilities management across four locations.

"Setting up an enterprise PLM system will allow us to expand our capabilities," said Dora Tripp, system administrator, Design Engineering Services, Alcoa Cleveland. "SMARTEAM's flexible data model has enabled us to build a complex, scalable knowledge structure for accessing and collaborating with in our organization."

In a successful two-year pilot program, the other subsidiary, Alcoa Wheel Products' Commercial Vehicle Wheel Division -- which serves the Class 8 truck and automotive OEM industries -- implemented SMARTEAM to vault and manage all its CATIA V5 product design data.

"SMARTEAM has the best integration with CATIA V5 for handling complex file structure interrelationships," said Jim Black, wheel tooling coordinator for Commercial Vehicle Wheels at Alcoa. "The engineers who work with this day in and day out believe this is key for our future."

Alcoa is the world's leading producer and manager of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum and alumina facilities, and is active in all major aspects of the industry.